1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to telephone information services and customer support. Other aspects of the present invention relate to a providing live customer support and telephone information services via a call center.
2. General Background and Related Art
In today's highly competitive market, the quality of customer support often provides a competitive advantage to products and the companies that produce the products. Measures used to quantify the quality of customer support may include the responsiveness of customer support personnel and the skill of the representatives or agents who interact with the customer. Responsiveness may be measured by how long it takes for a customer to receive the customer support. Skill of customer support personnel may be measured by how effectively the problem of a customer, that requires customer support, is resolved.
To offer quality customer support, many companies provide call centers which customers may call with questions. These call centers are staffed by agents who help customers during phone conversations. Responsiveness is an indicator of how long a customer has to wait ‘on hold’ until getting to talk to an agent. Skill can be evaluated based on how many times a customer has to call to resolve the problem. The number of times needed may be attributed to the agent assigned to handle the customer's problems. That is, depending on the nature of the problem, agents with different skills are assigned to handle different categories of problems.
To improve the level of skill, a call center may be designed so as to utilize an effective interactive voice response system which prompts a customer, who calls for support, to answer various predetermined questions by making touch-tone responses on the phone. If these screening questions are carefully designed, they can identify the nature of the problem and help the customer get to agent with the appropriate skills and authority to effectively handle the customer's problem.
The responsiveness of a call center is related, at least in part, to the capacity of the call center and the volume of calls. When a call center has too few agents to provide customer support, a customer who calls for help may have to wait a long time until the call is answered by the next available agent. Of course, increasing the number of agents leads to increased cost, including salaries, training and other overhead.
An alternative approach to improving the responsiveness of a call center is to introduce an automated call-back mechanism. Instead of requiring a calling customer to wait in line for an agent to answer the call, an interactive voice response system may be designed to monitor the call center (e.g., the number of customers currently waiting in line and the approximate number of minutes until the calling customer may be answered) and to offer a calling customer the opportunity to choose a call-back option. If the calling customer chooses the call-back option (instead of waiting), the customer is prompted to provide additional information including call-back phone number where the customer can be reached. The entered call-back phone number may then be stored in a queue at the call center, together with other information characterizing the request for help. This other information may specify the nature of the problem and the customer account number. This information can be retrieved later and used by an agent, selected based on the specified problem, to return the customer's call.
Another recently emerged customer service feature, is to allow a customer to activate a phone call to a call center via an Internet web page. Live customer support offered by a call center may be accessed by clicking a button on a web page. When a customer clicks on the button, a phone call is initiated to the call center that supports the customer service. Currently implemented systems that facilitates such a feature do not forward relevant web-data, which may include information such as customer account number and the specification of the problem, to the call center.
Most of the call centers operating today do not have an automated call-back capability. Even though it would improve the quality of customer support by converting existing call centers that do not possess such capabilities to systems that support such capabilities, the conversion may require substantial investment and at the same time, cause disruption of the service provided by the original call center. Integrating existing call centers with web capabilities usually leads to the same consequences. It is beneficial to introduce new technologies that utilize existing call center systems and add new capabilities, such as web activation capability and automated call-back capability, to the existing call centers without introducing any disruption to the systems that are currently in operation.